'Silicon Valley''s Faux-Logo Designer

Who creates the imagery for the fictional start-ups of HBO’s sly satire? That’d be Dorothy Street. The graphic artist came to Silicon Valley after stints doctoring centerfolds for The Playboy Club and designing fake-TV-show posters for Californication. “People aren’t really aware that this position exists in the film and TV industry,” she muses. (Spoiler alert: It does!) Street explains her latest designs.

Pied PiperThink Like a Bro Before Street started working on Pied Piper’s amateurish first logo, she asked Silicon’s male production assistants to take a shot at drawing the image. That helped her get into a dude-ier mindset — and showed her how “guys that didn’t have any artistic abilities,” like Thomas Middleditch’s soft-spoken programmer, Richard, would approach the project. “When we went back to shoot the series, there was a line about it looking like a d—,” she says with a laugh, “so we did tweak it from what we created in the pilot.”

Realities of the Valley “The last thing we want is two lowercase ps in a square,” T.J. Miller’s Erlich declares while contemplating a new tag. Of course, that’s exactly what they end up with — though Street points out that it’s not the worst idea, since the logo has to make sense as a button one might see on a phone or tablet.

HooliForging Ahead Street had to be careful when designing a logo for Hooli, Silicon’s take on Google. The tag needed to credibly resemble existing tech-company trademarks without being too similar: “We wanted it to be original, and I wanted everything to look modern,” she explains of the aesthetic. Hence the bells and whistles — the i dotted with a planet and the Saturn-like rings around the h — which also serve another purpose: “I wanted there to be something they could play with if the logo was ever animated.”